Trump repeated—favorably—an apparent myth
about how General John Pershing summarily executed dozens of Muslim
prisoners in the Philippines with tainted ammunition during a guerrilla
war against the occupying United States. “He took fifty bullets, and he
dipped them in pig’s blood,” Trump said. “And he had his men load his
rifles and he lined up the fifty people, and they shot 49 of those
people. And the fiftieth person he said ‘You go back to your people and
you tell them what happened.’ And for 25 years there wasn’t a problem,
okay?” …

The moral of the tale, according to Trump: “We better
start getting tough and we better start getting vigilant, and we better
start using our heads or we’re not gonna have a country, folks.”

Sarlin notes that the tale of General Pershing’s mass execution of 49 Muslims has been widely discredited
by the website Snopes, which gathered historical records of his tour of
duty in the Philippines, a cluster of islands in the western Pacific
Ocean that were ruled by the United States in the first half of the 20th
century. The false anecdote apparently arose from Pershing’s
involvement in the Moro Rebellion, a fourteen-year conflict between the Moros, an indigenous Muslim group in the southern Philippines, and the U.S. military.

The most unsettling thing about Trump’s aside isn’t that it’s false,
though. It’s that he’s indulging an openly racist murder fantasy—in
which an American military officer uses dead Muslims he had killed with
bullets dipped in the blood of swine (an animal whose meat and other
byproducts are considered impure, and thus forbidden from consumption,
by the Qur’an) to terrorize many more Muslims—in order to convince South
Carolinians to vote for him.

Presidential candidates are certainly not immune to promulgating fake Internet memes. Nor has Trump been friendly to Muslims, either: In the past few months alone, he’s endorsed preventing Muslims from entering the United States, shuttering a certain number of mosques (while placing the remainder under surveillance), and registering
every practicing Muslim in a national database. In that sense, today’s
utterance differed in degree, not kind: Trump will say anything, for any
reason, if it benefits him. At the same time, this tale gives us a good
sense of what kind of person Trump is pandering to, and what exactly
such a person would believe.

After a 10-year legal battle, U.S. district decide Alvin Hellerstein dominated last Fri that the U.S. government should unharness over two,000 Torture photos showing the abuse and pattern of individuals detained by the yankee military in Republic of Iraq and Afghanistan throughout the executive.

As reportable by the triumph Photography isn't against the law police answerableness diary, the centralized “is needed to disclose every and every one of the photographs” in response to a Freedom of data Act Request from the ACLU, because the government did not prove that “disclosure would endanger Americans.”

The centralized has tried to suppress these images, even going to this point as ever-changing the FOIA law on the Q.T. with the assistance of Congress in 2009.

The photos area unit crucial to the general public record, they’re the simplest proof of what befell within the military’s detention centers, and their revelation would facilitate the general public higher perceive the implications of a number of the Bush administration’s policies,” aforementioned ACLU deputy legal director Jameel Jaffer. “The administration’s explanation for suppressing the photos is each illegitimate and dangerous. to permit the govt. to suppress any image that may provoke somebody, somewhere, to violence would be to present the govt. sweeping power to suppress proof of its own agents’ misconduct. Giving the govt. that sort of functionary power would have implications so much on the far side this specific context.

The U.S. peace officer has 2 months to come to a decision whether or not to attractiveness, and continue the decade-long fight to bury the frightful truth exposing the inhumanity of the Bush Administration’s reign.

Among the frightful pictures the govt. could also be suppressing is alleged video of kids being sodomized ahead of their mothers at Abu Ghraib. fact-finding journalist Jane Seymour Hersh – UN agency exposed the My Lai massacre throughout the Vietnam War, wherever girls were gang-raped and mutilated – reportable that the U.S. military was sodomizing kids in Republic of Iraq on video back in 2004.